I knelt down and she sat astride my shoulders. She wouldn’t go upstairs or downstairs any other way; I walked downstairs very slowly, keeping to the wall. She talked all the time, running her words together, as she always did when excited; as far as I could gather a story had begun and in some way I – both as my­self and a furry horse – and the castle on Squirrel Gorge were part of it. There was a danger in the shape of a giant – but not, I think, a warm giant – and Barbara was both rescuer and rescued.

When we reached the hall I knelt by the window and put Barbara down on it. I pulled up the Venetian blinds; southwards, on the far side of Squirrel Gorge, I could see Sindram Grange. Tom Sindram had been dead now these twelve years; I remem­bered Bob Storr pointing him out to me at the Thespians one evening. He was a small, wizened old man who wore what was obviously a dickey; Bob, with a certain awe in his voice, had said that he was the meanest old bastard in the West Riding, which meant the whole world, and that he could cash a cheque for a hundred thou­sand and still have left as much again. But when he died – not long after I first came to Warley – he owed the Inland Revenue almost exactly a hundred thousand; and they never got a penny of it. Nor did they ever find out what he spent the money on; and for this reason he was remembered in Warley with something like affection.

And now he was dead and Sindram Grange had been taken over by the County as a Further Education Centre. A week-end course on the theatre – or was it Aspects of the Contemporary Theatre? – was being held there at this moment; I’d spent most of yesterday afternoon showing a party round the Thespians. I hadn’t accepted the invitation to attend the course; now, looking at the turrets and battlements of Sindram Grange, hazy through the morning mist, I wished that I had if only to tell Barbara that I’d been there. For Sindram Grange was her castle; this look at it through the hall window had been an early morning ritual for fifty days now. The ritual didn’t change, nor did the story; she always looked at the Grange in silence for a while and then, jerk­ily – she always seemed to find it necessary to hold her breath when concentrating – tell me that Barbara went home then.

But there were variations according to season; in February Barbara went home and there was snow. And cheese pie. This morn­ing as we went into the kitchen there were flowers. Flowers – she repeated it over and over again – all kinds of flowers. Then she put the story aside as she watched me fill the kettle at the sink.

“My juice,” she said and began to hop up and down. “My juice. Give me my juice.”